Floating offshore wind turbines enable energy generation in deep-sea locations, but platform motion from wind and waves alters aerodynamic loads and wake behavior on the blades, making performance prediction difficult.
To address this, researchers at the University of Florence‘s Wind Energy Group used Ansys Fluent, a computational fluid dynamics software, to model these flow interactions, including blade vortices and turbulence, aiming to understand how motion affects turbine performance at scale. Supported by parallel computing and a GPU-based solver, the team built a simulation framework and an open-access airfoil database, offering the wind energy community a resource to guide more reliable future turbine designs.
Image courtesy: Ansys
